Marie Lebert

“ The internet became mandatory to find information, communicate, access documents, and broaden our knowledge. People no longer needed to run after information. Information was there, by the numbers, available on our screen, often at no cost, including for those who studied in a remote place, lived in the countryside, worked at home or were stuck in a bed.
The web became a gigantic encyclopedia, a extensive library, a huge bookstore and a full medium on its own.
Some people even read a book on the screen of a computer, a PDA or a (still very expensive) ebook reader. ”

“ Education will be about participating in the production of the latest information. This is why education will have to be ongoing throughout life and work. Every day there will be something new that we will all have to learn. To keep up. To be in the know. To do our jobs. To be members of the digital community. And far from teaching a body of knowledge that will last for life, the new generation of information professionals will be required to search out, add to, critique, 'play with', and daily update information, and to make available the constant changes that are occurring. ”

“ And this has encouraged us to think of information as stable — as a body of knowledge which can be acquired, taught, passed on, memorized, and tested of course. The very nature of print itself has fostered a sense of truth; truth too is something which stays the same, which endures. ”

“ I never liked reading a book on a computer or PDA. Now, with tablets like the Kindle of the iPad, I am finally reading ebooks. I see a huge expansion of digital reading with tablets that are easy to use and with a very large choice of ebooks thanks to electronic commerce and companies like Amazon.”
What has he been working on lately? “I am a serial entrepreneur who is creating a start-up in the field of mobility. I use the internet all the time to find partners and ideas. We also use online books to learn the art of innovation!” ”

“ It is important not to repeat the same mistakes for the internet, especially for the web, a new medium the extent of which is still unknown in 1996. This is the raison d’être of the Internet Archive, that has defined itself as "a nonprofit digital library dedicated to providing universal access to human knowledge." ”

“ The internet of the future could be a “pervasive” network allowing us to connect in any place and at any time on any device through a single omnipresent network.
The concept of a “pervasive” network was developed by Rafi Haladjian, founder of the European company Ozone, who explained on its website in 2007 that “the new wave would affect the physical world, our real environment, our daily life in every moment. We will not access the network any more, we will live in it. ”

“ All my teaching makes the most of internet resources (web and email) : the two common places for a course are the classroom and the website of the course, where I put all course materials. I have published all my research data of the last 20 years on the web (re-edition of books, articles, texts of old dictionaries as interactive databases, treaties from the 16th century, etc.) . I publish proceedings of symposiums, I publish a journal, I collaborate with French colleagues by publishing online in Toronto what they can't publish online at home. ”

“ What part has the internet played in his novel? "The internet is a character in itself. Instead of being described in its technical complexity, it is depicted as a character that can be either threatening, kind or amusing. Remember the computer screen has a dual role — displaying as well as concealing. This ambivalence is the theme throughout. In such a game, the big winner is of course the one who knows how to free himself from the machine's grip and put humanism and intelligence before everything else."
# About the author
Alain Bron is both an information system consultant and a writer. ”

“ An extension of (local) popularization is the export of information technology around the world. Popularization has now occurred on a global scale and English is no longer necessarily the lingua franca of the user. Perhaps there is no true lingua franca, but only the individual languages of the users. One thing is certain — it is no longer necessary to understand English to use a computer, nor it is necessary to have a degree in computer science. ”

“ The development of the Digital Library will enable the British Library to embrace the digital information age. Digital technology will be used to preserve and extend the Library's unparalleled collection. Access to the collection will become boundless with users from all over the world, at any time, having simple, fast access to digitized materials using computer networks, particularly the internet. ”

“ The paper book is a tremendous 'machine'. We can't leaf through an electronic book in the same way as a paper book. On the other hand, electronic use allows us to locate text chains more quickly. In a certain way we can more intensively read the electronic text, even with the inconvenience of reading on the screen. The electronic book is less expensive and can be more easily distributed worldwide (if we don't count the cost of the computer and the internet connection) . ”

“ Based on the work of thousands of experts around the globe, the multimedia encyclopedia will gather texts, photos, maps, sound and videos, with a webpage for each species. It will provide a single portal for millions of documents scattered online and offline. As a teaching and learning tool for a better understanding of our planet, the encyclopedia will reach everyone: researchers, teachers, students, pupils, media, policy makers, and the general public, who will be able to contribute in a wiki-style environment, with contributions checked by experts. ”

“ The web 2.0 has been based on community and sharing, with a wealth of websites whose content has been supplied by users, such as blogs, wikis, social networks and collaborative encyclopedias. Wikipedia, Facebook and Twitter, of course, but also tens of thousands of others. The web 2.0 may begin to fulfill the dream of Tim Berners- Lee, who invented the web in 1990, and wrote in an essay dated April 1998: "The dream behind the web is of a common information space in which we communicate by sharing information. ”

“ It is a commercial product and a tool for reading. (...) We need to offer books that can be easily read on any electronic device used by customers, sooner or later with an electronic ink display. And to offer them as an industry. The digital book is not, and will never be, a niche product (dictionaries, travel guides, books for the blind) . It is becoming a mass market product, with multiple forms, like the traditional book." (Denis Zwirn, founder of the digital bookstore Numilog in 2000)
# April 2010
"The internet has taken more and more space in my life! ”

“ The fact that interactivity elements available within the PDF are not supported by the current mobile platforms has removed any possibility of experimenting new things in this direction, that had seemed very promising to me. While print publishing gives place to many different objects, ranging from the carefully designed art book to the basic book for everyday reading, the ebook market has grown from the start on a totalitarian and segregationist mode, comparable to a war between operating systems, rather than favoring a technical and cultural emulation. ”

“ As the internet spreads to parts of the world where English is rarely used — such as China, for example, it is natural that Chinese, and not English, will be the preferred choice for interacting with it. For the majority of the users in China, their mother tongue will be the only choice."
First published in January 1991, Unicode "provides a unique number for every character, no matter what the platform, no matter what the program, no matter what the language" (excerpt from the website) . ”

“ The wiki concept became quite popular in 2000. Deriving from the Hawaiian term "wiki" ("fast") , a wiki is a website allowing multiple users to collaborate online on the same project. Users can contribute to drafting content, editing it, improving it, and updating it. The software can be simple or more elaborate. A simple program handles text and hyperlinks. With a more elaborate program, one can embed images, charts, tables, etc. The most famous wiki is Wikipedia.
Facebook was founded in February 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg and his fellow students as a social network. ”

“ Unions were struggling worldwide to promote the creation of jobs through investment, innovation, vocational training, computer literacy, retraining for new jobs in digital technology, fair conditions for labor contracts and collective agreements, defense of copyright for the re-use of articles from the print media to the web, protection of workers in the artistic field, and defense of teleworkers as workers having full rights. ”

“ More and more Native Americans, for example, are contacting linguists, asking them to write grammars of their language and help them put up dictionaries. For these people, the web is an affordable boon for cultural expression."
How about the future of the web? "The web will be an encyclopedia of the world by the world for the world. There will be no information or knowledge that anyone needs that will not be available. ”

“ Computer technology has traditionally been the sole domain of a 'techie' elite, fluent in both complex programming languages and in English — the universal language of science and technology. Computers were never designed to handle writing systems that couldn't be translated into ASCII. There wasn't much room for anything other than the 26 letters of the English alphabet in a coding system that originally couldn't even recognize acute accents and umlauts — not to mention non-alphabetic systems like Chinese. But tradition has been turned upside down. Technology has been popularized. ”

“ The work of researchers is often publicly funded, especially in North America. It would therefore seem appropriate that the scientific community and the general public can freely enjoy the results of this research. 1,000 new scientific and medical articles reviewed by peers were published daily in 2000, with few of them free available on the internet.
The Public Library of Science (PLoS) was founded in October 2000 in San Francisco, California, as a non-profit organization whose mission was to make the world’s scientific and medical literature a public resource in free online archives. ”

“ Broadband became the norm over the years. Jean-Paul, webmaster of the hypermedia website cotres.net, summarized things in January 2007: “I feel that we are experiencing a ‘floating’ period between the heroic ages, when we were moving forward while waiting for the technology to catch up, and the future, when high-speed broadband will unleash forces that just begin to move, for now only in games.” ”

“ A third participant, Walter Durling, director of AT&T Global Information Solutions in the United States, had quite theoretical words about the matter: "Technology would not change the core of human relations. More sophisticated means of communicating, new mechanisms for negotiating, and new types of conflicts would all arise, but the relationships between workers and employers themselves would continue to be the same. When film was invented, people had been afraid that it could bring theatre to an end. ”

“ Librarians could finally fulfill two goals that used to be in contradiction: preservation (on shelves) and communication (on the internet) . People could now leaf through digital facsimiles, and access the original books only if necessary.
# At the British Library
In “Information Systems Strategy”, a document posted on the British Library’s website in 1997, Brian Lang, chief executive of the library, stated: "We do not envisage an exclusively digital library. We are aware that some people feel that digital materials will predominate in libraries of the future. ”

“ As explained on the website at the time, throughout history, societies have sought to preserve their culture and heritage for present and future generations, and libraries have been created to preserve the paper trail of that culture and legacy, and to facilitate its access to the general public and researchers. Therefore it seems essential to extend their mission to new technology. ”

“ The information available in books stays “static”, whereas the information available on the internet is regularly updated, thus the need to change our relationship to knowledge. In 1996, more and more computers connected to the internet were available in schools and at home. Teachers began exploring new ways of teaching. Going from print culture to digital culture was changing the way both teachers and students were seeing teaching and learning. ”

“ I am now [in November 1999] an information systems consultant, where I keep the main computer projects of firms and their foreign subsdiaries running smoothly. And I write. I have been writing since I was a teenager. Short stories (about 100) , psycho-sociological essays, articles and novels. It is an inner need as well as a very great pleasure.”
As for the aim of the internet, “the important thing is the human value that is added to it. The internet can never be shrewd about a situation, take a risk or replace the intelligence of the heart. ”